Long-time reader, first post here, and I feel it's a kind of n00bish first question... But I haven't found anything good on this.

Assume that the extra cost of current closed loop "all in one" watercoolers is not a concern.

Assume that the case has a good mounting position for a AIO radiator unit.

This is for a new silent gaming + main living room PC. It will be a Haswell i5, and a NVIDIA Maxwell GPU.

I don't have any friends who have AIO coolers. And much online information seems a bit old, pertaining to the older DYI watercooling kits. Anandtech did a good 14-way roundup, but they're a bit light on the coverage of fan and pump noise.

Are current-gen AIO watercoolers a good bet for silent computing, do they make it easier to achieve almost completely silent builds? If you were starting from scratch, would you prefer to go AIO watercooling, or high end air?

You'll find the bias here to be toward air cooling as all pumps make some level of noise and you are adding another potential failure mode to the system. That said, if you plan to overvolt the CPU as part of an extreme overclock, then liquid cooling can be the way to go. Or, if you have a 10' UI (keyboard on the sofa, PC near the TV), then the threshold for noise can be a fair bit higher.

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